It’s been a little over nine months since I started the SEO - Domainer Lovefest (if you think you preceded me, you can take credit for it on your own blog!) and John Andrews left me a comment the other day asking for a SITREP on my escapades. The following is a brain dump of what I’ve learned over the last year or so of taking domaining seriously.
In no particular order…
1. .com FTW!
If you ever plan on selling a domain name, either developed or undeveloped, the value of a .com is almost always worth the investment premium. For over a decade, .com has been so heavily branded that it’s the first thing in people’s minds and it can support its own economy of type-in traffic that has made many, many domain name investors rich. .Net’s and .Org’s seem to be selling for 15% of a .com…at best.
2. .net or .org DOES = .com for SEO’s
If you are not primarily concerned with managing the exit strategy of your web asset, an exact match .net or .org is a great way to develop virtual real estate in very competitive search queries. Point a couple trusted links at widget.org and you’ve got yourself a widget audience coming from the search engines.
3. Exact Match Domain Names are Uber Defensible
Audience defensibility (aka, “Defensible Traffic“) is something I take very seriously. There are a million ways for you to get bumped out of your SERP by a competitor, but [exactmatch].com/.net/.org is your version of The Alamo. Just ask Zillow…
4. An Audience is Harder To Develop Than A Brand, So Go Generic
If you are going to start a new business or launch an external campaign, do everything you can to buy the best, most appropriate premium domain name. Trust me, if you want to sell widgets or be in a widget service industry, widget.com is going to be a strategic asset and competitive advantage.
Widgetizzle.com might sound more brandable, but I’d rather have a lower cost of traffic, more defensibility of my audience, and the other 7,600 audience building advantages of a premium generic domain name than have to leverage off “brand equity” and the 18 dudes who use my site.
5. Unlike Fantasy Football Running Backs, All The Good Ones AREN’T Taken
Most people think that it’s impossible to find and register a virgin premium domain name. Wrong!
Since you’ve read this far, I’ll share one of my fishing spots for you. I know I’m not the only one fishing there, but it hasn’t yet been super-automated by too many guys, so you can mine it. Track all the new Wikipedia pages that are being generated. There’s a thousand pounds of shit to sift through, but you will find emerging topics that haven’t had their premium.com registered yet.Thank me later.
All that said, virgin domain name registrations may only make up 5% of my portfolio. It’s definitely not the path of least resistance, but you should always try to get the jump where you can.
6. “The Drop”
This was a very powerful technique for domainers older than myself, but it’s still pretty useful in securing premium generics. The real problem here is that it seems the Registrars are holding back as much of the Expiring/Deleting inventory from dropping and stocking their own reserves with these names. That’s ok, though. I see still see a handful or so a week that I will buy as investments or to develop. Snapnames has consistently crushed Pool for me, as far as services go.
7. Three-word Generics
One-word generic domain names are very valuable, very liquid investments trading in the six- and seven-figure ranges. Two-word generics are the easiest five-figures you’ve ever made. But three-word generics are the new black. This is where I’m killing it right now and I have a strategy in place where I’m buying most of these names…names that mean the world to a liquid market of buyers…for less than $250/each. I’ll tell you about it in a few years after I go Yun Ye on this portfolio…
8. The SEO/Domainer’s Dilemma: Development vs. Investment
As SEO’s, we know how to make a metric sh*tload of money per domain. Yet we don’t have enough production bandwidth to really scale all that talent. Domainers rarely make much money at all per domain, but they can scale into the hundreds of thousands of domains quite quickly.
My portfolio strategy on my domain names is a hybrid approach. With about a thousand or so names under management, I put them into four asset classes: “the bank”, development, domaining, Free Agents.
“The Bank” is the class of my Untouchables. These are the premium class domains I own and I plan on developing them into large media assets or selling them for a stupid number.
The Development class are premium generics that represent liquid market places of buyers and sellers, but they aren’t true premiums. These are generally two- and three-word names.
The Domaining class mimics your classic domainer model of lots and lots of domain names that somebody might type in and I monetize them via CPC ad inventory. If these ever show any real semblance of traffic, they likely get bumped up a level (or two) into development.
The “Free Agents” are names I actively trade. See the next point.
9. Moneyball
There is a ton of money in buying & selling existing domain names. So, for those of you with little to no audience development skill, there is still a very strong channel (and getting stronger by the day) in domain name revenue.
As in the stock market, you don’t always have to buy GOOG at $80 and ride it to $550. You could have waited and bought it at $275 and still doubled your jack. There is so much asymmetry in domain name buying & selling that there’s real money in riding “the last doubling”.
While you may be kicking yourself for not being the original $6.95 registrant of a domain name, if you can sell it for $5000 and you can buy it for $500 from the first guy, that adds up to real money!
As a real life example of this, I’ll share what is a great and equally-painful story for me. Many of you know I recently sold funeralarrangements.com at the Domain Roundtable auction in Seattle. That was an f’ing great domain name. It met all of my requirements for development, but I wanted to see how far I could take something I bought on a drop. I bought it for a few hundred bucks after it dropped on Pool and sold it for $9500 a few months later at the auction. I think the buyer got a smokin’ deal! In retrospect, as a more seasoned domainer, I’d probably have moved that from my Free Agent squad into Development had I been able to find an easier business development path for the industry.
10. SEO + Premium Domains FTMFW
SEO’s and Domainers aren’t called the Internet Dollar Divas for no reason. You combine the elements of real estate pioneering and industrial real estate development and you get a toxic audience cocktail that just keeps printin’ and printin’ money.
So, that’s it. Over the last year I’ve invested in or advised the purchases of over $2 million in domain names. It’s absolutely killed the returns of anything else I could have invested in short of a winning MegaMillions ticket. I’ll keep on buying more, but if I didn’t have the ability to develop these things, admittedly, I’d still be nervous as hell about sitting back and praying for type-in traffic. The way I see it now, even if the bottom falls out of classical domaining, I’ll use them for their development advantages. You know…being an SEO again!
PS. This post is dedicated to Rich McIver.
Did you enjoy this post? Subscribe to the RSS Feed and follow me on Twitter!
23 Responses to “Master of My Domaining: 10 Things I’ve Learned About Domaining Since I Jumped Into The Pool”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I’ve an amateur domainer myself but and have gotten some good 2 and 3 word domains. Where is the place place to sell your “Free Agent” domains?
I’m pretty good at finding good deals but am not sure where to unload the ones I don’t want to keep.
Good question. I don’t sell that many individually (most of my selling has been in small portfolio lots), but there are four major avenues of selling a domain for me.
1. Auctions like T.R.A.F.F.I.C., Domain Roundtable, etc.
2. Sedo, GoDaddy Aftermarket, etc.
3. Picking up the phone and proactively contacting entities who should have some level of interest.
4. Other domainers. Anyone I’ve met who plays in this space would want to know if anyone else was looking to unload something of value.
Again, someone with more experience selling domains might be able to chime in with some additional options.
Interesting post - thanks!
When acquiring new domains do you tend to focus on particular industry areas or aren’t you bothered about that and just focus on the strength of the domain name?
How much weight do you give to the age of a domain when bidding for dropped names?
Cheers
John
Have you had any success with Snapnames or Fabulous?
Brilliant post.
I was surprised what you said about Pool vs. Snapnames. I’d always thought the reverse. Hmmmm.
Thanks Brian. Good story, good advice, and fun reading at the same time.
As for where to sell domains at “end user prices” I think that’s another SEO insider secret. Your friendly SEO consultant is a prime avenue for your domains.
I have relatively few clients, but each month I have a handful of opportunities to point an eager buyer at an available domain. The primary goal is tranfer-the-domain-now, not haggle.
great post man…thanks for sharing..
-peter
One question I always wanna ask the real domain pros is:
Who says that generics are always going to be valued by the search engines? .dot coms have been around for only 12 years or so… who is to say that the current Google algorithms are something you can bet the farm on?
Brett:
Great question. I don’t consider myself a “real domain pro” by any stretch, but here’s my take.
Search engines look for corroborating signals of quality. The thresholds of acquiring and developing truly premium and exact match domain names are pretty high. If not atmospheric, certainly higher than competing signals that could be manipulated.
Spammers are not going to pony up a half-mill for a domain name. That’s just not how they work. It’s pretty safe to say that dude who buys pets.com is going to try his hardest to be an authoritative pet experience.
BP
Brian,
This is a fascinating article. I am not a domainer, but boy it seems fun. Would you please explain the criteria you use when deciding what domains to buy?
Thanks,
Fred
Agree with that statement Brian. Spammers don’t waste time analyzing the actual domain name.
WeThey look at how old it is and what kind of trust it could possibly have and that determines how long it will last. The generic domains are solid investmentswe’rethey’re not going to screw up by spamming.I’m curious what your thoughts are on the viability of emerging TLDs such as .mobi or .xxx (if it ever gets approval). Seems like .mobi was marketed heavily before the sunrise, but after the initial buying flurry ended the domain got zero support from the large backers (e.g. Google, MSFT, Nokia, etc.). To the average joe, mobi is still just a skinny bald guy workin the 1’s & 2’s.
Ok, I’ll admit it, I fell for the .mobi delusions of riches and bought a few single word city names that’ll probably amount to nothing.
Just curious what your take is. Are you tempted to go after emerging TLDs? Are these just a scam for the registries to make additional revenue (seems like the case w/ mobi)?
Some quick answers (btw, it’s never been more apparent to me that I need to find an inline comments Wordpress plugin):
Garret:
I’ve never bought a single .mobi. I just don’t ever see it getting any traction. I think the iPhone and other improved browsing on phones/handhelds will still have people navigating to .com sites. Hell, many sites are more inclined to build iPhone skins than to build a .mobi.
MadHat:
God bless you…err, them.
Fred:
I think that’s a whole new post. I think my theme is “market liquidity”…eg, buy things that mean something to a lot of people or gateway into other transactions. I’ll expand on that in the near future.
BP
great writeup, looks like we have the same vision of the synergy between SEO and domaining
You forgot about the all important #11:
“Add ‘lowdown’ to the end of any domain name and ensure that both users and search engines will automatically treat you with well-deserved authority.”
It’s called the ‘lowdown bump’, Matt Cutts mentioned it sometime back in December of ‘06.
Love it, love it, love it!
Excellent advice, and spot on. I love the thrill of chasing down a domain and the intellectual lift form coming up with a new one no one else has figured out yet.
Awesome tip about wiki, too - any chance you can remove that now that I’ve read it? LOL
Hi,
Nice to see SEO’ers and domainers coming together. Each group has a lot to offer the other in terms of ideas, development and more.
Dan
Excellent article.
Ten great points. I think the Wikipedia one is by far the best…………..I’m with Duane up above - take that point away before some more people read it
Ray
Amazing read!
Point #7 is great! These are the best ones to add cheaply to your portfolio. It is particularly useful in SEO!
I have regged a handful of these and parked at SEDO. Guess what? They show up on the 1st page of Goog after a few weeks (the parking page!!) just because the exact search terms are in the name! And mind you, these terms, with “quotes” sometimes have tens of thousands of search results in Big G!
Happy domaining!
Al.
Excellent info. - thanks for the tips - I am in the frustratin gposition othe rpeople here have mentioned, I’ve got some decent names listed with both Afternic and Sedo and parked - but not a sniff of interest !
I get my domains mainly from #6. I’m slowly working on getting my portfolio. I got a few from these. Though you got to be real patient.
I learned one really valuable lesson when it comes to domaining. One, have a lot of patience, Two, Keep yourself organized with all the domains you buy , Three, stick only with .coms, Four, You need a whole lot of domains to make it worth your while.